If you’d like to simplify the transfer of images from your camera to your computer, check out this post to the MaJe Forums. The writer’s wife enjoys working with the digital camera but is not much interested in messing with the command line to mount directories. To get around this, the author used the hardware abstraction layer to automate the transfer for her.

The author’s installation steps for the hardware abstraction layer daemon itself are specific to Gentoo, but you should be able to add hald support to any distro if it’s not already included. He then wrote a simple script to create a new directory for the photos, then to copy the photos and remove them from the secure digital card. Gnome 2.8 has support for hald, and by redirecting the prompt from Gthumb (the default) to his script, his wife can dump the photos to the hard drive with a simple click.

The script itself is very simple, and the only thing that concerns me is you could end up losing your photos if something were to go wrong. For example, if the photo directory is unreadable and the mkdir and cp commands fail, the script may just move on and delete the contents of the SD card. It would probably only take a little tweaking to add error handling to the script. Personally, I’d probably remove the rm line altogether; I tend to be paranoid and make sure the photos are on the computer and are readable, and only then use the camera to delete the photos directly by using the Erase All or Format Card commands in the menus.

Regardless of the exact method, however, this can be a very handy utility for photo buffs (or geek spouses of photo buffs).